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Online Auto Insurance News summarizes some of the past month’s most important developments in the car coverage industry and marketplace

Los Angeles (Vocus/PRWEB) March 31, 2011

Premium rates continued to climb upward, lawmakers in Mississippi and Alabama took steps to crack down on their uninsured motorist problems, legislators in Florida and New York began campaigns to attack no-fault fraud and a report showed smaller car insurance sites are getting a growing volume of online traffic.

The following summary sheet wraps up a few of March’s most significant auto insurance news stories covered at News.OnlineAutoInsurance.com :

* The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated in its latest report on consumer costs (http://bls.gov/cpi/cpid0211.pdf) that the price of insuring a vehicle rose one-third of 1 percent between January and February. Policy prices in February 2011 were 4.2 percent higher than in February 2010.

# Mississippi and Alabama — which have been estimated to have the second- and third-highest uninsured rates in the nation, respectively — may soon be getting insurance verification systems after legislators approved their establishment. By implementing the electronic systems, these states may be better able to identify drivers who flout compulsory coverage laws.
# Amid reports that no-fault fraud has continued to escalate in Florida and New York, lawmakers there have introduced bills that would make it easier for companies to contest questionable claims. Two of the bills in Florida have received favorable committee votes, while New York senators approved a bill to make staging auto accidents a felony offense.

# A comScore report showed that the volume of unique visitors to a sample of quote-aggregators’ and small insurers’ websites grew by 60 percent and 70 percent, respectively, between the fourth quarters of 2009 and 2010.

# Wisconsin legislators gave the final OK to a bill that would reduce minimum liability limits and eliminate stacking provisions.

# An insurer-backed federal bill that would establish national standards for teen-licensing laws was re-introduced to Congress. The STANDUP Act aims to cut the teen accident rate by requiring more extensive experience for teens before they receive full driving privileges.

To read articles about these and the latest car insurance news developments, readers can go to http://news.onlineautoinsurance.com/ where visitors will find the only site on the Web devoted to publishing nothing but the latest newsworthy stories about the U.S. car coverage industry.

Read more: http://www.benzinga.com/press-releases/11/03/p966271/march-auto-insurance-news-wrap-up#ixzz1IZaXC7fi

OLD WESTBURY, New York (WABC) — The Long Island Expressway was reopened in both directions in Old Westbury after an earlier accident.

Two people may have been struck by a passing eastbound car while changing a tire at Exit 39.

Their conditions were not immediately clear. Authorities called for a helicopter to take the injured to the hospital.

Two others who were in the passing car were also being treated for injuries.

The Long Island Expressway was closed in both directions for an extended period of time for the investigation.

The average car/truck/motorcycle accident verdict in New York is $837,020, which is stunningly high compared to most other jurisdictions.

Why is this? Are New York jurors just that much more generous than, say, jurors in Maryland?

The answer is that New York’s no-fault accident law requires that plaintiffs suffer a “serious injury” before a lawsuit can be brought against the at-fault driver. While there is some question that having a magical threshold that needs to be crossed is going to be fraught with great flaws, there is no question that this New York scheme, as desultory as the justice it might bring, keeps minor personal injury car accident cases out of court.

What’s my point? My point is that this completely distorts average car accident verdicts in New York. I read Metro Verdicts Monthly and Mealey’s which provide a lot of individual verdicts in car accident cases in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. It is amazing how many jury verdicts there are for $10,000 when, if you look at the case, is really not such a bad result. New York has none of these cases deflating their average.

One interesting thing about New York juries in accident cases drawn from the same Jury Verdict Research report that provided the average verdict data: plaintiffs only win 42 percent of the vehicular liability cases in New York. That is an astonishingly low figure that I cannot explain. Rear-end collisions accounted for 21 percent of these verdicts. Exactly how many rear end accident cases are legitimately contested? Let’s assume that all of those rear end accident cases were clear liability cases. A stretch but play along for a minute. That would mean that 27 percent of New York car accident cases that go to trial result in a defendant’s verdict. That’s incredible and I can’t explain it.

“I think that proportionately, the cuts inflicted on New York City are an outrage. We’re the one that is generating the money.”

—Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the state budget

The mayor has a beef with the governor and the Legislature. The just-adopted state budget, while painful for many, is too hard on New York City. In particular, it eliminated some $300 million in direct aid, while maintaining similar aid for other localities.

This is outrageous, Mr. Bloomberg says, because it hurts the state’s economic engine and further widens the yawning gap between what New York residents and businesses pay to and get back from Albany.

Though Mr. Bloomberg is correct, he misses a more important point. It is precisely because it is doing better than others that the city can be—and maybe should be—shortchanged.

A leading New York City business leader explained the problem succinctly several years ago. “Unless the upstate economy can be turned around,” she said, “it will become a welfare ward of the city.”

Fighting over a few hundred million dollars in this year’s budget is shortsighted; working on ways to turn upstate around would be more productive. Unfortunately, improving matters is a daunting task.

Many areas are in need: western New York cities like Buffalo (which lost 10% of its population in the last decade) and Rochester; central New York; the North Country; and the Southern Tier. Some have lost their manufacturing base; others never had much to begin with.

Few care. The New York Federal Reserve closed its Buffalo office in 2008, and I have found no one tracking the upstate economy in any detailed way since. And many initiatives have failed. Unshackle Upstate, a movement to revive the region by exempting it from the high costs of government rules on prevailing wages, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance and the like, went nowhere. Likewise, Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s attempt to split the economic development apparatus into upstate and downstate components produced only bureaucratic paralysis.

Downstate lawmakers have blocked the effort to free the state university system from Albany’s micromanagement—a move that could unleash creative forces on campuses in Buffalo, Albany and Binghamton. Could there be a better example of downstate interests trumping upstate needs?

The state budget is a step forward for upstate because it didn’t raise taxes. A property-tax cap would assist, too, as those taxes are an extra-heavy millstone upstate. More will be needed, however. The Committee to Save New York, so helpful in winning approval of the budget, could then turn its attention to reinvigorating the upstate economy—a benefit for all New Yorkers.

Terminated group self-insurance trusts in New York may apply to the state Workers’ Compensation Board to transfer their workers compensation liabilities by purchasing loss portfolio insurance, which the state calls an assumption-of-liability policy. In a December circular, the Workers’ Compensation Board said such a policy must be:

• In a form approved by the superintendent of insurance and be issued by a state-licensed insurer

• Issued based on a “single complete premium payment” made in advance by the group self-insurer

• Noncancelable for any cause

• Purchased after the group self-insurer satisfies all outstanding penalties and assessments

Source: New York State Workers’ Compensation Board